The British film The King’s Speech appears destined for glory with 12
nominations for this year’s Oscars but fastidious viewers have spotted that
it is littered with errors.

The film, which stars Colin Firth as King George VI during the build up to the Second World War, uses a type font which was not designed until 20 years later.

Cinemagoers see a BBC control room with the names of broadcast stations around the world but the signs are in Helvetica, which was not available until the late 1950s.

Other faults picked by the public include women wearing hosiery without seams when seamless stockings did not arrive until later; a frustrated king throwing down his speech only for it to reappear in his hand the next second; and the use of a plastic model biplane when the ones of the time were wooden.

The film also features a Tiger Moth plane with a registration which did not exist until 1941 and refers to the now Queen's younger sister as "Princess Margaret" when she was known throughout her childhood as "Princess Margaret Rose".

A series of other mistakes have been unearthed by picky film buffs in every contender for best film.

The Darren Aronofsky ballet film Black Swan which stars Natalie Portman as Nina Sayers, a dancer consumed by her art, alongside Vincent Cassel as the artistic director who drives her on, uses a shot of the pair at a fountain with a fleet of production trailers in the background.

In The Fighter, starring Mark Wahlberg and set in the 1990s, one of the lead’s relatives is seen driving his work truck which bears an inspection sticker on the windscreen which reads "2011".

The film Inception, which has Leonardo DiCaprio in the lead role, contains cars that explode twice, doors smashed in which repair themselves, inexplicable jumps from night to day and rainy days that turn instantly sunny.

True Grit, the remake of the 1969 John Wayne western which is set in 1880, suffers from a similar typographical error to The King's Speech, using a font almost a century ahead of its time.

A flyer for “Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show” is printed in ITC Cheltenham, a font which was not released until the mid-1970s.

Continuity and anachronistic errors have proven almost impossible to entirely remove from films but type experts believe little attention is paid to anachronistic use of fonts compared to errors in clothing or positioning, for example.